Album Review: Marillion – Marillion.com
The latest Marillion title for the Deluxe Edition treatment is the somewhat overlooked eleventh full length studio album, marillion.com – sometime stylised as mari11ion.com. Released in 1999 and coming just fourteen months after Radiation with many of the songs included here being unused ideas from that previous record.
Following the band’s departure from EMI after Afraid of Sunlight in 1995, Marillion found a home at Castle Communications for their late-Nineties trio of albums: This Strange Engine, Radiation and marillion.com, all released in consecutive years between 1997 and 1999.
The release of 1998’s Radiation came with talk of the band moving away from their perceived Prog roots and heading more into a modern rock arena; if memory serves me correctly, the name Radiohead was dropped several times leading up to Radiation’s release. To be honest, I think album ten fails to live up to that potential and, in my opinion, is the weakest of the Castle Communications trio.
Before the millennium, the internet was an oddity, a new thing that was just opening up to the wider world and Marillion were one of the first bands to fully embrace the potential of this brave new digital world. Hence the album’s title – and there was also a companion Racket Records Web CD titled marillion.co.uk sent to fan club as a Christmas gift.
Radiation’s Cathedral Wall can be heard in the opening A Legacy, which takes its disparate influences from as far afield as The Beatles, The Beech Boys as well as funk, jazz and film noir. It, like most of marillion.com’s early tunes play against their Prog reputation, bringing complete tracks in within an acceptable timescale. Go! pulses with Pete’s bass, giving the whole thing an ethereal lightness, also present in Enlightened.
Punctuating those tunes are .com’s more upbeat numbers: Deserve considers the consequences of action, while Ben Castle provides a driving saxophone, Rich has H do-dah-doing over the opening bars, leaving time for some quirky choices and interesting rhythms; Tumble Down the Years is as wistful as Marillion get, addressing what Life throws at you when you dare to make plans. According to Jon Collins’ book, Marillion/Separated Out: The Complete History 1979 – 2002 (Helter Skelter Publishing, London 2003), the band were going for something of a Crowded House vibe on this one (page 172). The most unusual song here is Built-In Bastard Radar, a Seventies inspired hard rocker, which even features a mellotron, but lack the legs or longevity of most of the band’s work.
Marillion.com closes with two longer songs: the epic Interior Lulu, a multi-faceted dream that one day – and you must remember this was 1999 – the internet would connect us all, regardless of distance. The protagonist, isolated, is introduced lying on her bed, with the possibility of endless connectivity a mere button-push away. This is Marillion doing what Marillion do best: taking an idea and running with it, cycling through all manner of phases and sounds to tell a story in fifteen blissful minutes.
Album closer is the ten-minute, Massive Attack-inspired, House, utilising dub, trip-hop, blues and jazz, and coloured by the messy disintegration of H’s marriage, it’s simultaneously classic Marillion and a fresh, new venture.
Originally produced by the band themselves with help from Porcupine Tree’s Steven Wilson, these new stereo & 5.1 mixes come from long-time associate, Michael Hunter, giving everything a crisp sharpness.
Discs two and three of this package is the band’s show at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire in November 1999 – which just so happened to be a couple of days after the show at the Manchester Academy, of which I have great memories.
Split across discs two and three, the show opens with the slow pulse of Go! Pete’s bass throbs, Steve R adding flourishes from the fretboard as Steve H comes in with the vocal. Radiation’s Under the Sun brings its message of impending environmental collapse in the jauntiest manner possible and it’s back to newbie Rich.
A large chunk of disc two is given over to newer material, with only bone fide H-era classic, The Uninvited Guest being rapturously received, Mark Kelly’s unmissable intro garnering cheers, the obligatory Brave suite of Mad/ The Opium Den takes London on a decent into despair in the most melodic manner, and the ever-present Afraid of Sunlight – which is still my personal favourite Marillion song – weaves mesmeric tapestries from the opening keys. This disc ends mid-set after another newbie, the upbeat submission to fate that is Deserve.
Disc three finds the set going deeper into Marillion’s past, beginning with the delicate strings of Easter from Seasons End and its comment on the Troubles; far less cutting than Marillion’s last consideration of Northern Ireland, Forgotten Sons, but no less poignant. The mood shifts for The Answering Machine, allowing a direct comparison of where the direction of travel has taken Marillion over the past ten years.
The Big Beat version of This Strange Engine’s ambient Memory of Water could be some of the most aggressive music Marillion has created, with the band jamming out against a huge low end; the big sweeping intro to Afraid of Sunlight’s conclusion, King, surrenders to introspective strings and H’s confessional vocal, before Mark’s massive keyboard enters to remind us we are mere ephemera in the face of the system.
A second suite from the conceptual Brave comes in the form of the title track’s ominous sustained opening chord, the dour seven minutes shouldn’t work in the live environment unless used as part of an entire album performance yet, somehow, it always does. The album’s coda, The Great Escape, is here delivered with passion and empathy for the protagonist as she looks for the sweet release of oblivion, bringing the main part of the show to a close.
The Radiation tour hadn’t seen Marillion delve further back into their own history than Brave, but tonight, not only have we been treated to a couple from the Hogarth debut in 1989, but the encore is comprised entirely of Fish-era: mega-hit Kayleigh arrives to great cheers and a clap-a-long to accompany that guitar-line. The cascading keys of Lavender follow, proving London is in good voice tonight, and Slainte Mhath shows H is more than capable of performing Fish-era material and making it his own.
As with all Marillion’s deluxe packages the Blu-Ray is an absolute treasure trove of goodies, including two different mixes of the album, one a 96.24 Stereo LPCM version and another a DTS HD Master Audio 5.1. There’s a whole plethora of demos, early and alternate versions of every track on the record, including versions of Deserve, Go! Rich, Enlightened, Tumble Down the Years, Interior Lulu and House from the Radiation sessions; various early or jamming versions of A Legacy, Deserve and Built in Bastard Radar; and a couple of remixed versions of A Legacy and …Bastard Radar from Steven Wilson and Trevor Vallis.
There’s even a couple of unused tunes Think Happy and Dreaming of Summer that, as far as I am aware, have not seen the light of day to this point. Elsewhere you’ll find the in-concert video from
the Oxford Zodiac, filmed in July 1999 and previously available as the Shot in the Dark DVD, it is included here in full, with additional, never-before-seen, material, including a couple of Beatles covers.
The documentaries on these things are always entertaining and informative into how the creative process led to the finished product, and here, we get Thank God for The Internet, an hour-and-a-half-plus delving into the writing, recording and touring of the album.
Marillion.com is unlikely to be classed up there with the likes of Misplaced Childhood, Clutching at Straws or Brave, and for the devotees of the Fish-era is possibly represents a further step away from the band they adore. Yet, for all that, the eleventh record is an honest album, one that isn’t trying to be anything other than a collection of good, sometimes even great, songs; and a bridge from the twentieth century to the brave new world of the twenty-first, when Marillion would embrace technology and mobilise the fan base with their first crowd-funded project, 2001’s Anoraknophobia. Thank God for the internet, indeed.
For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.
